Thursday, 29 September 2016

Today I share with you a super-simple game, but very motivating for children.

It is played in pairs or threes. Ten crayons are placed on the table. A child closes his eyes, and the other takes a few crayons; the object of the game is to guess how many crayons are missing when you open your eyes. It is such a significant context for the children that they make a great effort to discover the difference, the missing crayons. In other words, they are subtracting!

Tuesday, 27 September 2016

Today I want to share the first post about the new method we are using to teach mathematics to our younger learners. This new way of working is based on games, manipulation and try to make learning meaningful for children. In the photos you can see my first grade students playing "packages," a very simple game that involves dancing while the music is on and making packages with the number of children said by the teacher when the music is off. In the pictures where they are sitting, they are counting -according to my instructions- using their crayons

Monday, 26 September 2016

Today with the 7 years old pupils we tried to find all the different foreign words that we use in our french language.It started with ciao, vasistas, pizza, mozzarella, aficionado to end with Sandwich, brushing parking week end and so on.But the funniest was when we heard the sound that animals make according to the language and the country.

Wednesday, 21 September 2016

In Germany we often use the patterns of walls/ pyramids to exercise tasks in maths. You can use it for all operations. In class 4 we built real walls out of lego bricks and each child could create his own wall. They are very different in the level. In the end they fixed the labels in their book as you can see.
Silvia Hoffmann

Sunday, 18 September 2016

In ethics/ ethically education we talked about friends - how necessarry they are to us and what we like and dislike to do with them.

During our visited in Wales we were impressed, that the teachers work in all subjects at one theme and so we try combine more subjects in Germany too.
So I decited to work with the childrenbook "Freunde" (Friends) from Mies van Hout for this theme.
It shows in a special and very simple way what friends are needed for and it combines ethics, german and art in a great way.
At first we talked about the theme "friends" (ethics), then we read the book (german language), after this we talked about the drawings and later we painted pictures on our own (art). At the end we translated the words into English (learning other languages).

In year to we practice a lot of descriptions and recipies at the moment.
The "learn to learn"-set is really good to describe a building instruction to a partner. The children sit "back to back" and one children ist discribing and the other children needs to put the right bricks at the right place. Afterwards the children checked the results and gave eachother some advices for discribing.

It was really brilliant that they saw their results of their discription so closely afterwards and realized their mistakes by their own.

Like year 3 at the Kästner primary school we also expand the number space this year in year 2. We are now working with numbers and tasks between 0 and 100. To create an image in mind of the childrens about the new numbers, we also counted a lot of things. They built towers of 10 and saw how many ten and how many singles this number got.

In Math we calculate with money - Euro and Cent. To simulate a real life situation for the children, we organized a cake sale. Every pupil of the class baked a cake at home and than we sell them at school. It was hard work for the children, but in the end they earned their first own money and were really proud of their work.
The children wished to spend the money for some new books for our libary in class and donate some money for a social project in our hometown.